Gavin Barwell: Clause 2 builds on clause 1 to ensure that neighbourhood plans come into force sooner as part of the development plan for their area. It inserts a new subsection 3A into section 38 of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 to provide for a neighbourhood plan to become part of the development plan for that area when it is approved in the relevant referendum.
Without that change, there is a risk that neighbourhood plans might not be given sufficient consideration by decision makers in the period between the community expressing its support for the relevant plan at a referendum and the formal decision by the local planning authority to make the plan. When the neighbourhood plan provision was originally introduced, there was no fixed time period between those events. The Housing and Planning Act 2016 established an eight-week limit. The clause essentially  says that the relevant neighbourhood plan will be part of the development plan for the area immediately after a successful referendum.
The hon. Lady made two or three points and it is important to disentangle them. For some of the time she spoke about precedence, which was raised repeatedly in the evidence we received. I hope I satisfied the Committee on that point earlier when I quoted paragraph 185 of the national planning policy framework, which states:
“Once a neighbourhood plan has demonstrated its general conformity with the strategic policies of the Local Plan and is brought into force, the policies it contains take precedence over existing non-strategic policies in the Local Plan”.
I do not think I can make it any clearer than that. Neighbourhood plans must be consistent with the relevant local plan’s, in terms of the strategic framework, but once they come into force they take precedence over the relevant local plan on detailed non-strategic issues.
The hon. Lady raised, and the hon. Member for Bassetlaw expressed powerfully, the wider concern that people can put a lot of work into producing a neighbourhood plan and then find that decisions about applications in their area that are contrary to their neighbourhood plan are being approved, either by their council or by the Planning Inspectorate on appeal. Clearly that is enormously frustrating. I am not sure whether I can guarantee that it will never happen, but we should certainly seek to minimise it. I argued in response to the hon. Gentleman that clause 1 will help—I think he accepted that—but I accepted that it is not a complete answer. I promised that in the White Paper coming later this year there will be further policy measures that will go a long way towards satisfying him.
The amendment would introduce a third term—this is where my problem comes—that is about weight. I will try to clarify the position, because this is a complex area. First, let me say to the hon. Lady by way of reassurance that the Government’s policy is clear that decision takers may give weight to relevant policies in emerging plans. The national planning policy framework sets out with some clarity the matters they should consider. I will read an excerpt from it, because it will help the Committee:
“From the day of publication, decision-takers may also give weight to relevant policies in emerging plans according to: the stage of preparation of the emerging plan (the more advanced the preparation, the greater the weight that may be given); the extent to which there are unresolved objections to relevant policies (the less significant the unresolved objections, the greater the weight that may be given); and the degree of consistency of the relevant policies in the emerging plan to the policies in this Framework (the closer the policies in the emerging plan to the policies in the Framework, the greater the weight that may be given).”
In relation to a neighbourhood plan, that would imply that the greater the consistency with the strategic policies of the relevant local plan, the greater the weight that could be given.
We need to remember that the essence of our planning system, particularly when considering individual applications for development, requires choices to be made. We should not seek to alter the long-established principle that it is for the decision maker in each case to determine precisely what weight should be attributed to different material considerations. Let us take the concerns expressed by the hon. Member for Bassetlaw and imagine a hypothetical situation in which a local planning authority does not have a local plan with a five-year land supply  and is well below that. There is a neighbourhood plan in place that sets out where the community thinks appropriate development should go. A decision maker would then have to look at this.
The presumption in favour of sustainable development would apply because the five-year land supply is not there, so that would be one material consideration. The neighbourhood plan would be a material consideration pointing in the opposite direction, presuming the application was for a site that was not identified in the neighbourhood plan. There may be other material considerations—the views of local people will clearly be one. The site in question may be green belt or prime agricultural land, and there may be policies in the NPPF that would be material considerations. We have to accept that, in the way our planning system works, it is for the decision maker—whether that is a council planning officer, the planning committee of the relevant council, a planning inspector or, in some of the largest applications, a Minister—to look at the different weights to be applied to those material considerations.
Without referencing specific applications, which would not be appropriate, I can tell the Committee that in the three months I have been doing this job, I have had applications where a recommendation has come to me from one of my inspectors saying, “The decision should be x,” and I have taken the contrary view, because the weight that the inspector has given to a particular issue is not the weight that I would give to it. It is important to say that that does not mean that the inspector made a mistake. It is for the different decision makers to weigh the evidence before them, in the same way a judge does in a court of law.
My fear about the amendment is that changing the Bill to require the Secretary of State to set out precisely the weight that should be given to neighbourhood plans in all circumstances would take away some of the vital flexibility that decision makers have. The factors that I have talked about, including how far down the road the plan has gone, and whether there is unanimity that it is a great plan and there are no objections to it—as the hon. Member for Bassetlaw said, real contention can sometimes arise about the policies in a particular plan—have to be judged on a case-by-case basis.
I hope that the hon. Member for City of Durham will withdraw the amendment. The NPPF is very clear that weight can be given to emerging plans, but I do not think that we should be setting out in detail what weight should be attached to each part of the process, with the sole exception of what we have done in clause 1. We know that when a plan has gone through an examination process, those issues have been resolved and somebody has tested conformity with national planning policy and the relevant local plan. There is therefore a much higher degree of confidence at that point in the process.

Roberta Blackman-Woods: I have listened to what the Minister has to say, and I am not sure that his comments really addressed the very real concerns expressed both by those putting together neighbourhood plans and by those who might have to abide by them, in terms of the planning applications they wish to make. We can have a discussion about the degree of exactitude we might put into guidance about the weight at different stages of the neighbourhood planning process, but I would have  thought that it is perfectly possible for some rough idea to be put into guidance or subsequent regulations so people sitting on a planning committee understand the sort of weight they should attach in certain conditions and how the neighbourhood plan should be weighed against other considerations.
It is clear—there are lots of examples of this from across the country—that many planning committee are unsure how to give weight to a neighbourhood plan if it has not gone through a referendum and been adopted. In fact—I am sure the Minister has heard of many groups that have had this experience—neighbourhood plans are often completely ignored by planning committees, which might not even be aware that a plan has been undertaken in a particular area.
If the Minister does not want to put guidance in place, I urge him to think about how local planning authorities can be a bit clearer about what they can and cannot do with a neighbourhood plan at different stages in the process. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Roberta Blackman-Woods: I beg to move amendment 6, in clause3,page2,line25,at end insert
“after consultation with the local area involved.”
This amendment ensures that any changes to a neighbourhood development order or plan are first subject to consultation with the local area involved.
The amendment seeks to amend proposed new subsection 4A, which states:
“A local planning authority may at any time by order modify a neighbourhood development order they have made if they consider that the modification does not materially affect any planning permission granted by the order.”
The Minister might say that a modification to a neighbourhood development order or plan would not in any circumstances be made without the local community that put the plan or order in place being aware of it. Again, I seek clarity from the Minister. It would help our understanding of what the clause is trying to achieve if he would explain the circumstances in which he thinks a modification would be undertaken by a local planning authority. Does he see any circumstances in which it would wish to make such a modification without having a period of consultation with the local community or at least checking whether they were not unhappy with the proposed modification?
That is an important test of the Government’s commitment to localism, of which there will be a number this afternoon. As we have already mentioned, a lot of people put a great deal of effort and work into producing neighbourhood plans and, indeed, applying for and getting neighbourhood development orders. They would be really concerned if, at some whim of the local authority, their plan or development order could be modified, and indeed they might not know anything about that modification. I have sat in meetings in which people  spend an afternoon on a neighbourhood planning forum arguing over the content of one paragraph in the neighbourhood plan to ensure that they get it absolutely right and that it reflects what they think is the consensus of opinion. People could spend a great deal of time putting together an evidence base and then, for some reason that the clause is not entirely clear about, seemingly the plan could be modified without them knowing anything at all about the modification or the reasons underpinning it.
It could be that we are quite wrong about that and that somewhere else it is clear that the local authority must consult and ensure that the local community is on board. While I am talking about the amount of effort that local communities put into getting the plans and orders together, they are also often done at considerable cost in time and resources. Locality makes it clear in its “Neighbourhood Plans Roadmap Guide” that
“There will be costs associated with preparing a neighbourhood plan. Estimates vary widely; from less than ten thousand pounds to several times this amount”.
I certainly know that some have cost in excess of £50,000.
The point is that that is a considerable resource for local communities. Clearly, they will get some of that from the Government’s support for neighbourhood planning forums and neighbourhood plans, but in a number of circumstances they will have had to raise additional sums of money. They would not want go through the whole process of raising the money and getting their plan in place only to find that, five modifications down the line, some central tenets of the plan no longer hold.
We also know that putting a neighbourhood plan together can take a long time. The average time communities appear to spend is somewhere between 18 and 24 months. I know that the Government are seeking to reduce that time with a process that is much easier and quicker and that this legislation is part of that. Nevertheless, even after the Bill is enacted it is still likely to take communities a considerable amount of time—easily a year—to get all the documentation together and go through the various stages of the process. It will also take a lot of person hours because, as I said earlier, the groups get together and have to do substantial amounts of work in order to get their various assessments and policies together.
We are all committed to neighbourhood planning and to making neighbourhood plans work, and we would not want the clause to worry neighbourhood planning forums or parish councils that, having done all of that work on their plans, carrying out the referendum and getting the plan adopted, it could simply be modified out of existence by the local planning authority. That could perhaps happen because the direction of the local plan changes, or because the authority is thinking about changing it and it does not like what is in the neighbourhood plan.
I am not entirely certain about the circumstances in which the clause would be used, so it would be helpful to hear about that from the Minister. Will he outline the circumstances in which he thinks the provisions in clause 3 will be used, and how extensive he thinks the use of those provisions will be? What assurances can he give to neighbourhood planning forums and parish councils that their neighbourhood plans will not be modified out of existence without them knowing anything about it?

John Mann: There is such an argument, but in a small community with 200 or 300 houses, a parish council may be too grandiose. In that example, I would like to see the church managing and leading the development and consultation process, because that is the fixed community entity. I could give other examples in my area where the church building can be redefined as the church at the core of the community, precisely because the building was built as a community venue. Of the great cathedrals, Lincoln would be a great example, but the best of all is St Paul’s. If this was available 30 or 40 years ago, one could imagine that the buildings around the great St Paul’s cathedral would be more in tune with it, as opposed to what has been built haphazardly and chaotically around it. That is where smaller areas could be very empowered. I will give another example [Interruption.] The Whips are always keen to put Members on Committees and then try to restrict important debate.
This is fundamental to the Minister’s thinking and to his civil servants’ thinking. Planning is being seen in terms of housing and structures, with an additional side of highways, which have a major and fundamental role. The Prince’s Foundation work was done by Ben Bolgar, the top person there, and Fred Taggart, who are two brilliant planners—real planners, not just planners for real. They looked at where people historically moved and walked, which is what defines a community.
The walkways and jitties that are a problem could be closed off. That could be specified in a very localised plan: “We don’t want a walkway here. Close that off and get rid of it, because there’s antisocial behaviour. We want people to walk this way, drive that way and park here rather than there.” One gets into real localism, which never in a local plan would be possible. One could not in a local plan specify, “This little jitty will be closed down and we’ll create a walkway here. This bit should be grassed to allow more access to the canal.” That is far too much minutiae.
However, local people are hugely engaged in how that would operate. Those precise, minor details are actually the major details for them because they define their communities. If the price of that is to have to spend time saying, “Also, here’s the kind of housing we would like in the spare spaces that are available; here’s where we don’t want them and here’s where we do,” local people are more than happy to do it. Indeed, they propose more housing than would ever have been proposed  before because they can work out the geometry and geography of the local area and the blights that should be resolved.
That is why I appeal to the Minister, in the context of amendment 7, to go more and more small scale and to actually think through how, even with a neighbourhood plan in place in a larger conurbation, it should be logical to take that plan as a basis for micro-ising it for things like walkways and adding further detail, so that people have some control over their communities. When there is planning gain, they can then say to developers, “No, your cycleway will go here because it fits the community,” or, “There will be a cycleway because the community needs it, and you will have a footpath because it suits pensioners and young people and the kids going on their route to school.”
School routes—this is the final thing I will say—ought to be part of the local planning process and could be built in. There is nothing to stop it being built into the neighbourhood planning process. That really would be powerful, and I hope the Minister will be able to demonstrate that he is more than open to that, and that he is fully engaged in thinking, through with his brilliant officials, how this could be best and most quickly done.

With this it will be convenient to discuss amendment 14, in clause5,page5,line6,at end insert—
‘(2BA) Such statements of community involvement shall include measures to enable local parish councils to be set up in a streamlined and speedy manner.”
This amendment would make it easier for new parish and town councils to be formed.